Nintendo Switch online launched in September which came with some benefits that included the ability to put game saves into the cloud.

Now while this is a saviour to most as there are a lot of people out there who would have put 100+ hours into games, so being able to have this back up should something go wrong with your Switch, is a life saver.

However, with the good comes the bad. Not all games support Cloud Saves and you can see a list of the games below:

Now, it’s a pretty innocuous list at first glance, however when you look deeper into things, there’s a few games there that you have to question why Cloud Save isn’t supported.

Take Dark Souls, Dead Cells, FIFA and NBA. Most of these games, I would say are primarily offline single player games, so my question is, why isn’t the single player element supported in Cloud Save? For FIFA the Ultimate Team element is held on their servers, so it doesn’t really matter on that side of things, but if I was to start a Career or something in single player and something was to happen to my Switch, that progress is gone, despite the fact that Cloud Saves now exist. It’s the same for Dark Souls, Dead Cells and NBA, where any and all data from the game will be lost. (I’m not sure on the online element for these games, for the ones that have it, as I haven’t played them)

For me, in 2018, this isn’t acceptable, online data should be stored on servers and single player data should be backed up fully regardless of game. It just boggles the mind how Sony and Microsoft can do it and have been for ages, yet Nintendo can’t seem to pull it all together?

Another game from this list that annoys me is Splatoon 2, it’s not a single player game, this is a primarily online game, and however, if something were to happen to your Switch you would lose all data…. For an online game?! Por Que? I have first-hand experience of this as I have had a Switch brake on me.
I didn’t realise at first because I thought my rank and online data would be saved… online… Nope. Wrong. I was furious, the hours, the gear, weapons and everything else I had earned in the game… Gone in the blink of an eye. Once again, how can this be possible? Why isn’t online data for an online portion of the game saved on servers and kept available to sync back to a console?

You can tell me I’m going mad if you like, but when I play an online game, I would have liked to have hoped that my online data is preserved in the medium it’s designed for… online.

This just shows the startling gap in infrastructure that Nintendo has, yes I will admit that since the Switch’s launch there have been slight improvements, there is an online infrastructure now, and you can now share games between consoles. But the fact that not every game is being included in this and given the opportunity to save data to the cloud or have my online progress saved to a server is simply ridiculous.

This also brings me onto another point, the fact that even future games aren’t going to support save game to the cloud as can be shown with Pokémon. Now I know this is going to have a link to the app so you can transfer your characters across.

Now, since Pokémon Go launched, people have acquired a lot of Pokémon, can you imagine losing all those because your Switch broke? I’m not entirely sure how it would work with the ones from your phone, if you transferred them and they’re now on the console and not on the phone any more, im not sure, but still, can you imagine losing all the progress?

You would be heartbroken, just like I was when I lost 40+ hours or Zelda, Mario Kart, Splatoon 2 (this is 40+ hours for each game) plus the rest of the games that I own, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Football Manager 18 save, all gone.

I mentioned above that yes, there are steady improvements in how things are going but for me, this is something that should have been here long before September 2018, and probably even before the Switch launched in 2017.

The only thing I can really hope for is more change and hopefully a lot of improvements to the system in general over the next year and I know the above list is quite miniscule but there are still big games there that a lot of people will be playing. Add into the fact that it seems not all games will support the feature (for now) improvement is needed.